Will Curbing Iran’s Nuclear Threat Boost Its Proxies?

The nuclear deal with Iran defers one looming confrontation with Tehran, but it may accelerate others by emboldening and enriching Hezbollah and the other proxy forces that the Islamic Republic uses to advance its interests across the Middle East and beyond.

The most immediate beneficiaries of the historic nuclear agreement might be beleaguered Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group that is fighting and dying on his behalf in Syria’s many-sided civil war, according to U.S. and Israeli experts. Hezbollah is thought to have between 6,000 and 8,000 fighters in Syria, and to have lost close to 1,000 men there.

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Tehran has been funding Assad, who is desperate for cash, to the tune of $1 billion a month, said Ali Alfoneh, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank. He said a nuclear deal that allows Iran to access more of its frozen assets abroad, and to sell oil more easily, will give it greater leeway to support Assad.

Iran’s support for the Syrian president has wavered at least once since the war began. In late summer 2013, after his regime unleashed chemical weapons against civilians, talk in Tehran turned to “sacrificing Bashar al-Assad and bringing someone else into power in Damascus, and finding a compromise solution [with] some parts of the Syrian opposition,” Alfoneh said.

That approach found support among senior civilian leaders in Tehran, including newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. But the Revolutionary Guard opposed it, Alfoneh said, on the grounds that removing Assad would result in the collapse of the entire Alawite system, which the security force viewed as key to Iran’s interests in Syria. “The Revolutionary Guard won the argument,” he said.

Just as with the Assad regime, the influx of cash now expected to flow into Tehran’s coffers will allow Iran to increase its support for Hezbollah, experts said. “The war in Syria is not exactly a popular cause, and Hezbollah must pay economic compensation to families of the martyrs who die in Syria, and they also need access to arms and money, so that would [have to] be imported for them,” Alfoneh said.

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